Office of Mercy (9781101606100) Read Online Free

soberly. “That was fifteen days of terrible suffering that could have been preempted. Another week and I would’ve appealed to the Alphas to let us sweep the men and the camp separately.”
    They arrived at Natasha’s desk and Jeffrey’s eyes met hers, while he continued muttering coordinates into his speaker. His gaze was at once anxious and calm, curious and slightly aloof. Yes, Natasha was sure now that he had stayed for her. After all, a full-Tribe sweep within America-Five’s perimeter, the fifty-mile radius of land that they monitored with sensors, didn’t happen every day. This was by far the largest sweep since Natasha had joined the Office of Mercy, and Jeffrey probably wanted to hear her reaction.
    â€œSo now all we have is the Pines to deal with,” Arthur was saying. “Speaking of which, there’s a new group for you to follow. Yesterday the man we think is their chief broke off from the camp with two other guys. I’d like you to track them. Tell me if they get within ten miles of the Crane sweep site. That’s the last thing we need after three months with these clever animals. I’d rather set off diversionary fires than be forced into a sweep that way.”
    â€œOf course,” said Natasha.
    For weeks in the Office of Mercy, they had worried about the complications of having two Tribes in the field (an unprecedented occurrence that promised to grow more common, with recent cold fronts pushing the Tribes south). The citizens’ biggest fear had been that the Cranes and Pines would meet at some inopportune moment and incite a small but violent war between them. That would have caused multiple problems. For not only would the Tribes have suffered physically and emotionally from the warfare, but the fighting would have forced them to scatter—to run away from an attack, or to leave the weak in one place and march the strong to another—making a sweep of an entire group that much harder. But the worries in the Office of Mercy had not ended with the sweep of the Cranes. Now they had to make sure that the Pines did not find the Crane sweep site. This goal was in strict keeping with a principal rule in their ethical guidelines: namely, that no Tribe should ever be allowed to suspect that there was such a thing as sweeps. For if the Tribes ever did suspect that people like themselves were being systematically wiped from existence, they would feel dread, and dread was a particularly terrible form of suffering, worse even, as some had argued during the debates of Year 121 Post-Storm, than purely physical pain.
    Jeffrey waited until Arthur had left for his office, behind a glass partition, before rolling around to Natasha’s side of the cubicle. Natasha was already busy settling into her desk for the day, but she looked up, anticipating his movement. She was glad for his notice. It seemed that Jeffrey was as eager to speak to her as she was to him. And for the first time since she’d heard the blaring alarm in the night, Natasha’s nerves relaxed.
    Natasha trusted Jeffrey, far more than her Epsilon friends or even Arthur, to put the events of last night in perspective. Not that the others weren’t helpful or wise, but Jeffrey alone had the power to speak precisely to her hidden troubles, like a sensor eye that infallibly finds the crouching, warm bodies in the teeming wild. For a long time (especially since beginning her career in the Office of Mercy), Natasha had felt a deep closeness with Jeffrey, a similarity between his mode of thinking and hers that she experienced with no one else. It was as if their thoughts existed on the same, flat plane of awareness: noting the same behaviors in other people, dismissing the same concerns as unimportant, and creating the landscape of their individual lives from a similar set of compulsions and worries.
    Had Natasha vocalized this feeling of closeness between her and Jeffrey to other people in